Dan Schlatter/Puget Sound Business Journal

Troy McGuire, vice president of news and general manager of Fisher Interactive Network

Fisher Communications, parent of KOMO-TV and radio, boosted its investment in “hyperlocal” news in August with the launch of 43 blogs for communities around the Seattle region, working with a geographically targeted advertising system developed by DataSphere Technologies. Fisher also plans to work with existing bloggers, and incorporate content contributed by its viewers and readers.

It’s a competitive landscape: The Seattle Times subsequently announced an arrangement to work with established blogs in the region, including MyBallard.com and the West Seattle Blog.

Troy McGuire, vice president of news and general manager of Fisher Interactive Network, explained the “KOMO Communities” strategy and how KOMO will integrate the blogs into its operations. This extended version of the interview also includes comments from Gary Cowan of DataSphere.

Why did KOMO and Fisher decide to head this direction, with these new community blog sites?

McGuire: This allows us to take the news we’re already doing and put it in a place where people are, their neighborhoods. We get so many press releases, we get alerted by every agency in this community, daily, about what’s going on, and most of it we can’t fit into a newscast. This gives us the ability to take everything we get on the desk, and aggregate it to those neighborhood sites.

Cowan: There's two things here. One is that it allows KOMO to leverage existing expenses in terms of newsgathering and so forth, and make use of the long tail of content that they generate and comes across their desk. All of a sudden they've got inventory, or an opportunity to actually expose that. And then, the second thing is that they have a terrific asset in the TV stations and radio stations -- a megaphone, if you will, to actually make people aware of the availability of this content online. And so it's the natural convergence of taking the assets that they have available and turning it into this online asset.

Seattle actually has a thriving ecosystem of existing neighborhood blogs — some of them affiliated, some not. Do you see this new initiative from KOMO and Fisher as competition for them?

McGuire: We think that, just like in media, the more voices you have, the better. MyBallard.com, West Seattle Blog, they’re all very good sites. If you look at our site, we talk about those sites. We think they’re great. But we think that we can also add something. This is really taking the content that our reporters and our photographers, our producers are generating every day and putting it into places where it will be more easily accessible ... I always like to point out, we’re based in Seattle, and all of our employees at Fisher live in those neighborhoods, so it’s not like we’re some big outside company coming in and taking over hyperlocal. We live here, and we’ve been in business in Seattle for 100 years.

Cowan: I think over time, we expect to really work with those sites, as well. We're gathering information from multiple sources. One is from within the existing KOMO news staff but also obviously KOMO takes in AP feeds and so forth, so they're being sort of reused here. We have set up a very easy way for users to generate content, as well, to contribute. Troy has established a relationship with Windermere Real Estate for them to form the backbone of the user-generated content to start. And then over time, we want to start pulling in more content from other local sources of information, as well. We've already done that with Seattle Weekly for events, and we expect to extend that out over time and work with local bloggers, where we can give them more exposure for what they're doing.

You’re partnering with Windermere Real Estate for some user-generated content. How will that work?

McGuire: We had the idea to work with Realtors because they drive around and they have cameras, and they do a lot of community work, obviously, with their jobs. The one rule that we have with them is that they can’t write about real estate. We don’t want it to look like there’s an ad. There’s been no money that has changed hands in this deal. When we were talking about what groups to reach out to for user-generated material, Realtors just struck us as a natural fit for that, because they are community-based.

So they’ll be able to log in and post on their own to the KOMO Communities sites?

McGuire: No, aside from the KOMO news team material, nothing will get posted without one of our KOMO producers looking at the material.

How will this be incorporated into the reporting process and broadcasts?

McGuire: With our iPhone acquisition for the reporters and photographers, it’s been a real culture change, just inside the newsroom, but if you start that conversation at 9 a.m. with the user, you have a much better chance of them watching you at 4 and 5.

So they’re now going to be posting to these sites from their iPhones?

McGuire: Yes. Our hope is that they start posting first to the neighborhood sites. Then, if it’s a big enough story, it gets published to Komonews.com, and then of course to TV as a finished product at 4 and 5 or whatever newscast is next. Like every television station in the country that’s held back content — debating whether to post it to the web or not — we are fully trying to get 90 percent of our content, if not more, published to the web first.

What are the potential revenue implications here — Is this a big business?

McGuire: We hope it is, of course. We haven’t had a lot of (advertising) products for small businesses, and we finally think that we have a solid, credible product where any small business can afford to advertise with KOMO.

Can you give me a thumbnail sketch of how the advertising system works?

Cowan: At the moment we are focused on geotargeting, and what we have is two layers: We have a generic IP default targeting capability, and then on top of that what we're building is this neighborhood targeting. ... The challenge with IP is that it's a fairly broad targeting capability, so it will tell you somebody's in Seattle, but it won't tell you what neighborhood. It can target Bellevue, Kirkland, Seattle, that kind of level. But obviously there are multiple neighborhoods within each one of those broad, geographical areas. So what we try to do is we pick one that we think is the default, if you will, and let people go in and change that to target a more specific neighborhood that's relevant to them. The ideal level of targeting is at the neighborhood level.

(If you search on komonews.com), you'll notice down the right-hand side that there are a bunch of ads. Those ads are geotargeted. We've been selling those (prior to the KOMO Communities launch) with very positive uptake from the local business community. We think the hyperlocal extension was an obvious thing to do to leverage that sale capability, that targeting capability, onto a much broader base of assets.